


Sugar Sweet

by LadyProto



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Crushes, Cyborg Simmons, Cyborg!simmons, F/M, Fluff, Twinkies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-07
Updated: 2016-09-07
Packaged: 2018-08-13 15:15:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7981213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyProto/pseuds/LadyProto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Simmons devlopes a taste for the sweetest thing on Chorus</p><p>[cute baby Jensen being adorable]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sugar Sweet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EpsilonAlpha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EpsilonAlpha/gifts).



> I was challenged by my friend Kayla to write something that didn't end on angst, death or dismemberment. She introduced me to RvB in the first place, so I figured I should try.

“I, uh, Sir, I, here!” Jensen accidentally jabs her captain with her fingers, bare digits against armored chest plate as she pushed both hands towards him. She jitters with nervous enthusiasm as she presents Simmons with a cellophane wrapped snack cake laid out on her outstretched palms. 

"Jensen, What the-oh." Simmons looks past the cake, past her trembling hands to her downward turned face. Her eyes are nearly squeezed together with fretful anticipation of Simmons's inevitable acceptance or denial as she offers up a childish token of affection. She's a school girl despite her kill count with red pigtails and soft fading scars on her round cheeks. She's young, impressionable, and she worships him as her war hero. 

She's different today, different from when he first met her a month ago in a flurry of awkward stutters and that look of pure admiration. She normally spoke slowly, rehearsing her lines several times in her head and silently practicing her enunciation before ever opening her mouth, but now her words tumble forward, tinted with sparkling pink excitement the same color as her strawberry lip gloss. Despite the full decade age difference she's waiting for his approval. Today her hair is a little neater, her clothes a little cleaner, and nerves a little more on edge. He’s in full armor, but she’s dressed like the seventeen year old girl she is, in ragged jeans and cartoon sweatshirt. “A twinkie?” Simmons asks her, mimicking her awkwardness with a cracking voice and anxious fluster. 

Jensen's eyes light up like the green of the purest fields at his acknowledgment of her, but she refuses to make eye contact. Her eyes skittishly dart from the door frame to the wall to the snack cake -- anything but his visor and eyes. She stutters out her words and tilts her head back to finally smile up at him. She fidgets twirling her hair around her pinkie finger. “Actually its a cloud cake. It’s off-brand, and It’s all I could find here because --”

He doesn't understand her timid, shrinking violet mannerisms. Girls only play coy for quarterbacks and basketball stars, and he is not a picturesque form of masculinity. He's always been pathetically inadequate -- too tall, too thin, always too much of something and never enough of something else. He sees himself in her nervous tics. They're just two scrawny kids desperately asking for attention. “Thanks.” He steadies his voice, trying to put on an act for her. He clears his throat, and attempts the stronger tone of a captain. “Thank you. Where did you get a Twinkie?" 

She smiles up at him like he's her savior. Her smile shows metal and bones welded together in her mouth like on his body, and he can’t help but smile back under his helmet. She's a doe-eyed kid nervous bundle of energy experiencing puppy-love for the first time and observing every moment of it with wonder. “...I have my ways."

He takes the cake from her, exaggerating his nodding through his armor. He holds it gingerly with metal fingers, trying to not squish it in front of her and break her heart. She holds eye contact a little longer this time, and Simmons sees her rolling her tongue around the backside of her braces, restructuring sentences around her lisp. They’re alike: Self-assured, sarcastic and smart talking in their own heads, but when faced with reality they become a puddle of insecurity. She’s a reflection of him, only purer. Where his red hair fades into brown, her hair was brighter than the ripest cherries. His freckles blend into rough blotches, but hers dance on milky skin like stars. He's the metal and flesh surgical nightmare, and she's the innocence of freshly fallen snow. She lisps nervously, full syllables against her broad tongue. “Are you going to eat it? I mean.. You can do it later. Don’t, I mean, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I don’t like eating in front of people either. You don’t have to eat it at all, I was just.. I thought since -”

Simmons stiffens, body rolling back from her words like they were knives. She doesn't know. How didn't she know? Had she really never seen him without his helmet? He's been mostly metal since Blood Gulch, when he gave half of himself over to medical incompetence in order to keep Grif alive. He had been vivisectioned and filleted only to be carelessly brought back into consciousness as a Quasimodo monstrosity. Rough exoskeleton form that chopped up Simmon's body with geometric edges bursting forth from organic bones. Muscles atrophied where machines prevailed, and they left sink holes and left weak, hollowed spots of degenerating tissues. He hid in his helmet as often as he could, partly to pretend he was still that at Blood Gulch, partly to keep the fearful whispering to a minimum. The reason she could look at him longingly is because she'd never seen his bare face so her fantasies could be whatever she formed him in to.

He's a surgical disaster but his hesitation to eat in front of her was more than vanity. He can't eat easily any more. Its a show of his loss of humanity presented as hypertorphic scars interlinking where machine met flesh. He’s only able to do the slightest motions with his lips because of the scar tissue, and it pulls the corner of his mouth upward, puckering the skin into rough dents and peaks. To eat at all, he has to go slowly an. taking tiny bites before chewing on one side of his mouth with awkward pudgy cheeks. 

While the idea of letting her see his face is terrifying, he can’t deny her of any request. He never truly learned to say no, not to anyone, and definitely not to a beautiful young girl that would literally march to hell for him “....yeah..." He trails off before reaching for the seal of his helmet. It releases with a hiss. She tilts her head with idle curiosity as he removes his it slowly, dramatically even. He's deliberately cautious, using each centimeter he unveils as a warning that if she sees something that scares her, that she doesn’t have to stay

Her green eyes widen as his face comes into view: his pale and freckled neck, his chin almost too delicate for a man, an then the machinery. Metal plating frames the slope of his jaw, reinforcing the crumbling bone structure. There’s pins on the surface of his face, poking through the hollows of his cheek to support where his orbital had cracked form botched surgery. His eye is the most haunting: a red glowing marble that rolls around in its socket too loosely to even pretend to be human anatomy. It washes them both with the neon pink of impersonality. 

She backs up a step, putting more distance between them so she can study him with wide eyes. "Oh” she whispers, unable to form a proper sentence and he doesn’t know how to respond. Jensen doesn't flee, but she doesn't stop staring. It’s his turn to refuse eye contact, as she takes in every deformity. 

He’s never felt this exposed in front of anyone before and he doesn't know why he's so willing to do this to himself for her. Deep down he hoped that she would leave, turn and flee while he watches her red braids wave behind her. It would protect them both that way. She would move on to daydreaming about a guy she deserved, and he would feel the rejection now instead of waiting for the inevitable downfall to cycle through in a type of self-fulfilling prophesy of heart break. He tried to snap himself off the the depression and slowly handed the still wrapped cake back to her.

“That is so cool!” 

"Huh..?" 

She looks up at him again, so utterly enthralled that her face lights up like the sun and he feels her warmth building behind his metal ribs. Her smile arches like a rainbow and eyes light up like gold and emeralds. “I’m really into mechanics. That is so cool!” She repeats, fists at her side to contain her excitement. “I mean you were cool before, but wow!” 

He finds himself mimicking her again, smiling the best he could with his mangled mouth. He never knew this is what he wanted: to just be accepted in its simplest form. She's beyond acceptance and is in wonderment of him all: Every screw, every staple, every pin - She raises her hand, and comes so close to touching his face, and he wishes she wouldh more than he’s every wished for anything. More than he wanted the war to end. More than he ever wanted a generic pretty girl. He wants her to touch him. He wants to tell her that it’s okay, but his mouth is full of twinkie and her eyes are full of wonder and it’s good. They are happy for once at this moment, together. Just Jensen and Simmons and a the sweetest thing on Chorus.

**Author's Note:**

> And they were all happy until Grif screams about his missing snack cakes.


End file.
